Time Is Flying for Timeflies

The future is looking very bright for Cal and Rob “Rez” Resnick, the musical masterminds of electro-pop-hip-hop-rap group Timeflies. In the months following their first major release, with the track “All Night” in late October 2010, the duo has built a formidable following. Now with more than 10,000 Facebook fans—and 100 more joining every day—Cal and Rez, both 22, have mastered the fine art of social media, using Twitter to generate and perpetuate hype among thousands of followers, who eagerly await the release of Timeflies’ first album, The Scotch Tape, early next month.

“There’s no doubt that social media has been hugely instrumental for us getting all these fans,” says Cal, the vocalist, who met Rez, the beat-maker instrumentalist, at a party when they were undergrads at Tufts University, near Boston. “I’ve got to say, I was a little reluctant at first to create a Twitter account, but Rob convinced me to get [my] act together. We try to respond to fans and retweet their comments and just keep our fan base buzzing—keep them involved in what we’re doing and stay involved with them.”

Indeed, the Internet has been good for Timeflies, whose videos on YouTube—most of them amateur-hour productions featuring Cal freestyling over Rez’s remix—have together received more than one million views. Nearly 150,000 of those resulted from their catchy reinterpretation of The Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea,” in which Cal, between sips from a can of Bud Light, soulfully strings together his flow while Rez goes to town on his new steel drum, a graduation present. The video was posted on June 7, 2011, as part of “Timeflies Tuesdays,” when they release an original musical video—a weekly routine the pair started “to give people an insight into what we’re doing,” according to Cal.

“Something we’re proud of, but that’s also a little shocking, is that we’ve done every recording basically in whatever bedroom I’m living in,” Rez says of their self-styled “nomadic studio,” which will lose much of its wanderlust when he moves, this October, into a Brooklyn apartment with a space reserved for recording music.

Aside from a shared, and often hysterical, love of Timeflies, the group’s fan base is as diverse as Cal’s and Rez’s respective musical tastes. Asked about their newly released single, “Stunner,” a track off The Scotch Tapewith a relatively mainstream sound, the double act takes a you-can’t-win-’em-all approach. “[‘Stunner’ has] done really well, especially the acoustic version we put out. People are loving it,” says Rez, who cites electro-centric British D.J. Flux Pavillion among his musical influences. “That said, we’re always going to have our hip-hop fans who like some of our tracks where Cal does more freestyling and the beats are a little more hip-hop. They’re always going to say [‘Stunner’] is too pop-y.”

“At the same time we put out a raw hip-hop track and we got the same comments: ‘W**here’s the pop-y?,’” adds Cal—who credits a longtime penchant for Blues kingpin Muddy Waters, A Tribe Called Quest, and Janice Joplin for his unique sound—of the unavoidable discord among their fans. “So that’s one of the pitfalls of deciding that we’re not going to be in a specific genre . . . but the fact is we’re going to keep covering all of those genres.”

In Cal and Rez’s shared opinion, good music, like anything else worthwhile, takes time and effort to find, just as it does to create. But thanks to the innumerable digital platforms at their immediate disposal, the task of locating quality music is now much easier than ever before, they say.

“The Internet is a great place for music, and it’s really awesome that we’ve been so successful at it. We give everything out for free . . . At this point it’s not about revenue,” says Rez, before Cal cuts in: “If we build it, then the success will come. But there’s no reason to rush that.”